Guitar World magazine turns 25 this year, and it's celebrating
with an anniversary issue that is the literary equivalent of a
screaming, shrieking guitar solo with the amp turned to 11 and
enough feedback to make your ears bleed and the fillings fall out
of your teeth.
And this is altogether fitting and proper because Guitar
World is not only America's most popular guitar mag, it's also the
guitar mag that isn't afraid to take things one step too far --
and then go a couple steps further. It is, for example, the
magazine that conducted an interview with guitar god Jimi Hendrix
despite the inconvenient fact that Hendrix had been dead for
decades.
The anniversary issue details Guitar
World's shameless (but highly successful) stunts,
including an interview with Jimi Hendrix -- long after
his death.
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"I thought, 'What would it be like to talk to Jimi
Hendrix?' " recalls Brad Tolinski, Guitar World's editor-in-chief.
"And then I said, 'Let's try to talk to Jimi Hendrix. Let's
have a seance!' "
This brainwave occurred in 1993 -- 23 years after
Hendrix's death and about five years after Tolinski was hired to
liven up a lackluster guitar mag started by a cheesy New York
publisher as a way to cash in on the rock market.
Tolinski borrowed one of Hendrix's Flying V guitars from
the Hard Rock Cafe and somehow acquired an amulet allegedly made
out of a lock of Hendrix's hair. Accompanied by a gaggle of
Hendrix acolytes and a soothsayer named Zena, Tolinski carried
these holy relics to Electric Ladyland, the famous New York studio
where Hendrix recorded the 1968 album named after the studio.
As Tolinski and friends circled the sacred guitar, shut
their eyes and held hands, Zena contacted Hendrix. Jimi issued a
warning against dope and booze, but when the Guitar World folks
asked technical questions about the master's greatest solos, the
phone lines to the afterlife got fuzzy and Zena couldn't hear
Hendrix's replies.
In other words, the interview was a dud. But Tolinski had
persuaded "Good Morning America" to cover the seance, so at least
it worked as a publicity stunt.
"We're shameless," he explains.
Shamelessness is a big part of what makes Guitar World
fun, and the 25th anniversary issue is a shameless chronicle of
shameless stunts.
It recounts the story of Guitar World's absurd
"insect-themed" issue in 2001, which featured stories on the
Beatles and the rap/metal band Papa Roach.
And its goofy 1999 3-D issue, which included a pair of
cardboard glasses that enabled readers to eyeball a 3-D cover
photo that showed one guy from Limp Bizkit yelling into the ear of
another guy from Limp Bizkit, whose eyes seem to be popping out of
his head.
But all this tomfoolery serves merely to disguise the
fact that Guitar World is really a serious educational magazine.
Not only does it publish countless interviews with great
guitarists, it has also taught a generation of Americans the finer
points of playing rock guitar.
In fact, a case can be made that Guitar World and its
spinoff mags -- Bass Guitar, Guitar World Acoustic and Guitar
Legends -- are among America's most effective educational
publications for teenage boys, who make up a large portion of GW's
200,000 circulation.
"We get them to pick up the instrument,
play the instrument, express themselves and read," says Tolinski.
"That's a tough thing to get a young guy to do, and Guitar World
gets people to do it."
Guitar World teaches guitar-playing by publishing
elaborate note-by-note transcriptions of the guitar
parts of many of the greatest songs in rock history.
When GW began printing these transcriptions in
1986, it changed the way readers relate to the mag, as
the anniversary issue wryly notes: "Like a dirty
magazine, Guitar World became a publication readers
would stare at for hours in private, while perfecting
their technique."
